The story was like a page torn out of a missing diary. It had a gap in its middle, its beginning suggested an earlier beginning, its ending left the listener suspended, waiting for more. Sybil could only guess at the events that had gone before and come after, could only imagine the larger, longer narrative of which the tale seemed a surviving fragment. But her imagination deserted her; she was too distracted by the clutter of packing boxes, clothes, china, crystal—the detritus of a marriage whose failure she neither regretted nor celebrated, but greeted with a kind of relief. Yet, the tale skipped around the edges of her thoughts all that week, pestered and puzzled her, so a couple of days before the movers were to arrive, she phoned her cousinuncle Myles and asked to see him, the author of an unfinished family history, The Braithwaite Gathering. He had become something like the Lakota shamans who kept winter count—a living repository of tribal memory. For Sybil had often thought the Braithwaites were more a tribe than a family, and more than a tribe, a consanguineous commonwealth of patriarchs and matriarchs, aunts, uncles, first, second, and third cousins. They didn’t have an army, constitution, or formal borders, but they possessed most of the other attributes of a state. They had their own capital at Mingulay (to which Braithwaites still made yearly pilgrimages to renew blood ties and remind themselves of who they were), their own pantheon of heroes, and their own national epic presenting their best image of themselves: They were courageous, perservering, sober, industrious; they made sacrifices on the altar of principle, above all they served—their country, their Protestant God, and the cause of improving humanity. A portion of their saga was contained in books; the rest was oral: stories passed from generation to generation, along with the sets of engraved silverware, the antique vases and furniture, the books and jewelry and paintings. And those narrative heirlooms, remarkably, had changed as little as their physical counterparts over the decades; they were sacred myths, not to be revised carelessly nor allowed to undergo the mutations stories usually do in telling and retelling. Sybil had heard them all her life, and had taken their moral lessons so much to heart that when, as a child, she’d been told to blow out her birthday candles and make a wish, she’d repressed her desires for a new toy or dress or some other girlish frivolity and wished instead for world peace, racial justice, the brotherhood of man. How could she do otherwise, descendant that she was of Silas Braithwaite, the clipper captain who’d stood on deck for forty-eight hours in a gale, refusing to rest or eat until his ship and crew were safely through the storm; of a Connecticut headmaster who had left his green campus to help establish a school in Tombstone, when the Earp brothers were teaching different lessons with six-guns; of Theophilus Braithwaite, a fervent abolitionist who had defied the Fugitive Slave Act and turned his house into a way station on the Underground Railroad; and of Theophilus’s son, Cyrus, who had rejected the chance to have someone go to war in his place? She had not listened to those tales so much as she’d absorbed them into her flesh and marrow, breathed them in and breathed life into them, until the events became as events she had lived through herself, and the ghosts of her forebears as real as people she had known. No likeness of the clipper captain existed, yet she had seen him, long-jawed, long-nosed, bushy-browed, bearing the wind’s wet lash with a martyr’s forbearance (and perhaps, too, with the martyr’s exultation in suffering), and that same inner eye had shown her the runaway slaves huddled in the abolitionist’s cellar, hungry and shivering in the alien New England cold, waiting for final deliverance to Canada, frightened still of the catcher’s hounds whose baying must have been grooved into their very eardrums.